The Broken Hours: A Novel of H. P. Lovecraft

by Jacqueline Baker

  But within all darkness is the possibility of light.

  Providence, tonight, is lightless. All down College Street the old houses turn inward. Beyond the observatory, Butler Hospital lies like a dead star, consuming its own darkness. The moon is not yet risen, the stars still dark, though the river is there, winding its black way through the sleeping city.

  Time is short. The night falls and falls.

  I ask you: How much loss can we be made to bear?

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  In the spring of 1936, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was chronically ill with the cancer that would kill him less than a year later. The aunt he lived with was in hospital recovering from a mastectomy, leaving him alone, a situation which, in spite of his reclusiveness, he’d never borne easily. Over the course of those few weeks, during which he believed he suffered only from the flu, he despaired over his lack of literary and, therefore, financial success, and he mourned the loss of his idyllic childhood, claiming he was on the edge of a nervous breakdown, not the first in his life.

  For “facts” of this sort, I looked to Lovecraft’s excellent biographers and to his own letters. But facts, like ghosts, too, are perhaps best viewed from the corner of the eye. Lovecraft himself wrote: Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them. Although this work of fiction is based on the known “reality” of Lovecraft’s life, I have taken liberties with certain details while, I believe, remaining true to the spirit of the man I found in his stories and letters.

  Memories and possibilities, Lovecraft also wrote, are ever more hideous than realities.

  My thanks to Lovecraft’s biographers of the real. To Jane Warren, Martha Magor Webb, Timothy Birch, and Nicole Frail. To John, Gabrielle, and Julian. To my mother, Lorraine, as always. And, especially, to Steven Price; what a debt of gratitude lies herein.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One

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  2

  3

  Two

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  2

  3

  4

  Three

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  2

  3

  Four

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  2

  3

  4

  Five

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  3

  Six

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  3

  4

  Acknowledgements